Martyrs and Mystics. Ed Glinert

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СКАЧАТЬ six years before being taken to Smithfield and executed for denying royal supremacy over the Church.

      Featherstone was also a chaplain to Catherine of Aragon and a tutor to Mary Tudor, her daughter. In 1534 he was asked to take the Oath of Supremacy but refused to do so and was imprisoned in the Tower. After Powell, Abel and Featherstone’s execution their limbs were fixed to the gates of the city and their heads displayed on poles on London Bridge.

      Barnes, Gerard and Jerome, the Protestants, were prosecuted for supporting the doctrines of the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli. Of the three, Barnes was the most interesting character. Henry VIII sent him to Germany in 1535 to encourage disciples of Martin Luther to give their approval to the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. By the year of Barnes’s execution Henry had decided to oppose Luther’s reforms vehemently. Barnes had made a speech at Paul’s Cross attacking a rival cleric, which caused turmoil within the different factions of the king’s council. Barnes was forced to apologise but it wasn’t enough to save him.

      • John Rogers, 1555

      A Bible translator, Rogers became the first Protestant martyr to be executed during the reign of the Catholic queen, Mary Tudor, when he was burnt at Smithfield on 4 February 1555. Rogers had produced only the second complete English Bible (published 1537), the first to be translated into English from the original Hebrew and Greek. He printed it under the pseudonym Thomas Matthew, but much of it was the work of William Tyndale, whose pioneering English translation had caused the Church such distress.

      Prior to his execution, Rogers was asked by Woodroofe, the Newgate Prison sheriff, if he would revoke his ‘evil opinion of the Sacrament of the altar’. Rogers replied: ‘That which I have preached I will seal with my blood.’ When Woodroofe responded, ‘Thou art an heretic,’ Rogers retorted, ‘That shall be known at the Day of Judgment’.

      On the way to Smithfield Rogers saw his wife and eleven children in the crowd, but was not allowed to talk to them. He died quickly for the flames soon raged. Nevertheless he was courageous enough to pretend to be washing his hands in the fire as if it had been cold water. He then lifted them in the air and prayed. As he died a flock of doves flew above, leading one supporter to claim that one of the birds was the Holy Ghost himself.

      • Roger Holland, 1556

      Holland was one of forty men and women convicted for staging prayers and Bible study in a walled garden in Islington. With the Catholic Mary Tudor on the throne, such practices were no longer considered acceptable, for the ruling Catholic ideology wanted only priests to read the Bible and even then only in Latin (not its original language). Holland and others believed they were safe from hostile prying eyes, but they were spotted and arrested by the Constable of Islington, who demanded they hand over their books. The Bible readers were taken to Newgate Prison where they were informed they would be released as long as they agreed to hear Mass. Most of them refused to do so.

      When Holland was taken to the stake he embraced the bundles of reeds placed there to fuel the fire and announced: ‘Lord, I most humbly thank Thy Majesty that Thou hast called me from the state of death, unto the Light of Thy Heavenly Word, and now unto the fellowship of Thy saints that I may sing and say, “Holy holy holy, Lord God of hosts!” Lord, into Thy hands I commit my spirit. Lord bless these Thy people, and save them from idolatry.’

      • Edward Arden, 1583

      A Catholic from the same Warwickshire family as Shakespeare’s mother, Arden was probably the innocent victim of a Catholic plot to overthrow Queen Elizabeth. He died protesting his innocence, claiming that his only crime was to be a Catholic. His son-in-law John Somerville, who was implicated alongside him, was tortured on the rack, after which he implicated others. Somerville was found strangled in his cell before he could be executed.

      • Edward Wightman, 1612

      Wightman was the last man burnt alive in England for his religious views – he was a Baptist. At the time, James I, not a particularly bloodthirsty zealot in the Mary manner, was on the throne and the burnings had almost ceased. As the historian Thomas Fuller once noted: ‘James preferred heretics should silently and privately waste themselves away in the prison, rather than to grace them, and amuse others, with the solemnity of a public execution.’

      → Hangings at Tyburn, p. 51

       SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE SYNAGOGUE, Bevis Marks and Heneage Lane

      What is now Britain’s oldest synagogue was built in 1701 on the site of the Abbot of Bury St Edmunds’s town house with its entrance on the side of the building as the City authorities were worried about the reaction of non-Jews walking past a synagogue door. Bevis Marks was opened for Iberian Jews whom Oliver Cromwell had officially allowed to return to England in 1656. (The community’s first synagogue, on nearby Creechurch Lane, no longer exists.)

      Bevis Marks’s register of births includes that of Benjamin D’Israeli (later Disraeli) in 1804. Despite his Jewish conception, the future Tory prime minister was baptised at St Andrew’s, Holborn, after his father rowed with the synagogue authorities. The baptism allowed Disraeli to become a Member of Parliament and later prime minister. Services are still held in Portuguese, as well as Hebrew.

       THE TEMPLE

      The Inner and Middle Temple, two of London’s four Inns of Court where lawyers live and work, takes its name from the Knights Templar, a body of French warrior monks, founded in 1129, who protected pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land. Gradually the Knights Templar became ever more powerful until Pope Clement V disbanded them in 1312 and handed their assets to their rivals, the Knights Hospitaller (the Order of St John of Jerusalem). They now became wealthy landowners, buying this estate in London which they leased to lawyers. The Knights Hospitaller themselves had their possessions seized by the English Crown in 1539.

      Unofficially the Templars still exist, controlling affairs through their semi-secret offspring organisation, the Freemasons. In recent years various individuals and esoteric groups claiming to represent the Templars have emerged, mostly because of the publicity given to them by the success of the Dan Brown novel The Da Vinci Code. It remains to be seen whether they will try to claim ownership of Temple Church, especially now that a body calling itself the Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ has launched a court case in Spain, demanding that the Pope ‘recognise’ the seizure of their assets worth some €100 bn.

      → The Knights Templars in Warwickshire, p. 188

       TEMPLE BAR

      The historical boundary between the ancient cities of London and Westminster, marked by a statue where the Strand meets Fleet Street, was the site of the Pope-burning ceremonies of the late seventeenth century. Every year on 17 November, the anniversary of the accession of Elizabeth I, an effigy of the Pope, seated in his chair of state, would be carried through the local streets in mockery of the papal coronation ceremony, by people dressed as Catholic clergymen. When the train reached Temple Bar bonfires were lit and the ‘Pope’ was cremated.

       TEMPLE CHURCH, Inner Temple Lane

      Since the early twenty-first-century publication of Dan Brown’s religious thriller The Da Vinci Code, much public interest has centred on Temple Church, London’s oldest Gothic building, which features in the novel. The church was built from 1160–85 in the style of the Church of the Sepulchre in Jerusalem. A door in the north-west corner of the choir leads to the penitential cell where knights who had broken Temple СКАЧАТЬ